India gets Disney-less theme park

Dean Nelson

India's first entertainment theme park is due to be launched near Mumbai on Thursday with a series of rides based on Bollywood films, Hindu gods, Mughal forts and a dubious subcontinental dinosaur - and not a single Hollywood cartoon character in sight.

Adlabs Imagica, spread over 32 hectares on a site between India's film and commerce capital and the retirement town of Pune, is India's answer to Disney's recent statement that it would never build a theme park in India because the country's infrastructure was not yet ready to meet its standards.

Making a splash: Visitors enjoy a ride on a water slide at the Adlabs Imagica theme park at Khopoli. Photo: AFP

Indian businessman Manmohan Shetty said Hollywood had no part in his theme park because Indians had very little interest in foreign films. Only 8 per cent of audiences watched American films, while the overwhelming majority loved home-grown Hindi, Tamil, Kannada and Bengali cinema.

His theme park reflected Indians' love of their own culture, he said, with attractions based on the dungeons and legends of Delhi's Mughal-period Salimgarh Fort, and a bumpy car ride mimicking the adventures of the Bollywood superhero from the cult 1987 film Mr India.

Other rides include one themed on Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and a river ride named after the fictitious Indian dinosaur, the Rajasaurus. ''We call it the Indian dinosaur, but no one will question me about something from 15,000 years ago,'' Mr Shetty said.